


little birds are dining (warily and well)

by theexistentialqueer



Category: Tokyo Ghoul
Genre: F/M, Gap Filler, Gen, No Beta, Post-Anteiku Raid Arc (Tokyo Ghoul), Post-Tokyo Ghoul, Pre-Relationship, gratuitous Alice in Wonderland references
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2019-03-20
Updated: 2019-03-21
Packaged: 2019-11-26 00:26:31
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 2
Words: 5,431
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18173429
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/theexistentialqueer/pseuds/theexistentialqueer
Summary: Hinami calls Takatsuki Sen.(And Alice falls down the rabbithole.)





	1. down the rabbit hole

**Author's Note:**

> I don't have any definitive plans for how to end this, so expect this to be a series of one-shots until I either get bored or come up with a conclusion.
> 
> Ayato is not in the first chapter so if you came here for Ayato/Hinami, just be aware Ayato isn't even referenced here. I'm tagging because I plan for Ayato to be in chapter two. I'm sorry, I'm not trying to disappoint you! I'll tag additional characters/relationships as they pertain to chapters I add.
> 
> I almost want to tag for something related to child abuse because the way Eto interacts with Hinami in the original series has this subtle aspect of non-sexual grooming to it that really creeps me out.
> 
> The bookstore Hinami meets Eto in is based my my experience in the Book Loft of Columbus, OH, which is one of my favorite bookstores.
> 
> Title comes from the Lewis Carroll poem "Little Birds."

Hinami uses the card as a bookmark, that way it's a reminder, when she has to do something, that she needs the strength to do it. Kaneki needs her help on the twelfth day, so she places the bookmark at the twelfth page, and it's lucky, because the twelfth page there's a line that says _danki_ , and the weather that night is expected to be warm and balmy, and what a coincidence that it's twelve days after her preliminary journal entry for the month, where she plans to write about Kaneki, and how she still can't find him, and she misses him.

And that day comes up.

And she still can't find him.

She stands on the roof of the nearest building to Anteiku they can manage without drawing suspicion, takes a deep breath and lets the smells of the ward fill her lungs, lets the sounds in that radius fill her ears until she can filter them down into information. It's all so overwhelming it takes her hours to process, but by the end, she comes to a conclusion.

Kaneki isn't here.

Kaneki isn't anywhere.

 

* * *

 

Touka stops by one day, a few weeks after the doves' numbers in the ward have dwindled from a swarm to a steady, oppressive stream, and she can pass through the streets with a hood pulled tight over her hair without drawing suspicion.

It's been all over the news: that popular cafe in the 20th Ward was run by ghouls. And Touka's face, as the poster girl of Anteiku, is too familiar around here.

Banjou lets her in after peering cautiously through the peephole, and shuts the door quickly behind her. Once Touka is inside, she pushes her hood back and shakes out her hair.

"I brought supplies," she says, handing a freezer bag over to Banjou. "But it's the last I'm going to be able to bring for a while. I can't afford to keep stopping by so frequently. I'm too recognizable around here."

"I understand," Banjou says, taking the bag and hefting it, trying to judge by its weight how far this will get them, before they need to hunt on their own, or go looking for bodies the way Touka's group does. Hinami won't be happy if they have to--

"Onee-chan!" Hinami's voice rings out along with the sound of feet pounding across the floor, and Hinami dives at Touka with such force that Touka stumbles back and has to catch her weight. Her voice is muffled by Touka's hoodie when she says, "Oops. Sorry."

"Hey, Hinami-chan," Touka says breathlessly, rustling her hair. It's growing out now, without Kaneki around to cut it. "How're you holding up?"

"I'm okay," Hinami says brightly, but it sounds hollow, false. There's a sort of tired sorrow hiding in the shadows under her skin, the same tired sorrow the rest of them feel anymore. They all lost something precious that night, but Hinami's lost more than most in such a short time. Her dad, her mom, her home, Kaneki, her home again. Touka exchanges a glance with Banjou over the top of Hinami's head. "I've run out of new books to read, though. Can I go outside yet?"

Touka pulls back a little so she can look down into Hinami's face, one hand resting at the side of Hinami's head, threading the fine strands of Hinami's hair between her fingers. "Not yet. It's still too dangerous right now. Sorry."

"Oh," Hinami says, looking a little crestfallen. "But I can come stay with you and Yomo-san soon, right?"

Touka smiles, but it's just a mask, just pretend reassurance. "We'll see. Can I talk to Banjou for a bit?"

"Okay," Hinami says glumly. She walks slowly back to her room, and looks once more at Touka before she shuts her door.

 

* * *

 

She tries to focus on her book--she's rereading _Monochrome Rainbow_ , because it makes her think of Kaneki and even though thinking of him right now feels painful, it feels better than not thinking of him at all--but she can hear Touka and Banjou through her door.

They're talking quietly, but neither of them realize the extent to which her senses have developed, how acute her hearing has grown. Sometimes loud noises too close to her feel painful. Sometimes she hears things she'd rather not hear: a man hitting his girlfriend, the sounds of two people engaged in something intimate, a bullied child crying. It's just at the very fine edge of her control: some moments she can shut out the sounds and smells, and at others they overwhelm her.

She's not strong enough to control this by herself, but there's no one who can help her.

"--need to get her out of here," Banjou is saying. "Have you gotten any intel about which ward we should move to?"

"Not yet," Touka says. "Yomo-san has tried to reach out to that friend of his, the information broker who runs that bar, but they're shut up tight these days. I think what happened in the 20th Ward really spooked people."

"Well, the doves haven't mobilized in those numbers since--"

"Yeah."

"Do you guys even have a proper base yet?"

"No." Touka sighs. "It's lucky Yomo-san has so many safehouses around the city. The doves have been so active, it's been hard to get food. We keep having to move every couple of weeks so we don't set up a pattern that can be traced."

"That sounds tough." Banjou sounds frustrated. "I wish I could help, but as it is, I'm barely just capable of taking care of Hinami-chan."

Their conversation changes track, and Hinami tries to push their voices away until they're a mumble in the back of her head.

So Touka wants Banjou to take her somewhere else. And it's hard for Banjou to take care of her.

She's a burden.

"I wish I was strong enough to help everybody," she mumbles, pulling her knees to her chest and resting her head against them. Strong enough to protect herself. Strong enough to protect the rest of them.

Will Touka disappear one day too, the same way Kaneki did?

Music blares from someone's car, roughly three blocks away. Hinami shudders.

As it is now, she's just weak.

 

* * *

 

"Hey, Hinami-chan!" Banjou says one day as he returns from one of his errands outside. "Guess what Touka sent us!"

Hinami sets her book aside and gets up from the living room couch to help him set his bags on the table. She starts to unpack them. Shampoo, soap, deodorant, laundry soap, garbage bags--a book!

Hinami pulls it out of the bag and turns it around in her hands wonderingly. It's by an American author, about a girl who had tripped into another world that fit her perfectly, until one day she winds up back where she started, in her own world, and sad. Her parents send her to a special school to try to make her normal again, but she longs for the world she found.

_It's sad_ , Hinami thinks, _to find a place where you belong, and to have everything go back to the way it was before_.

But at least she has a new book. At least she has _words_. The apartment, which had been growing steadily claustrophobic as the months pass, suddenly expands in size and feels filled with fresh air.

"Oh, yeah, she sent that too," Banjou says, nodding at the book. He's rustling around in another bag. "But what I meant was--here!"

He pulls out a small box and hands it to Hinami, beaming with pleasure, like he bought her a gift himself.

Hinami looks from the box up to Banjou. "A...cell phone?"

"Great, isn't it?" Banjou grins. "They're called 'burn-er' phones. You pay for 'em up front and then you can use 'em until your time runs out, and if someone finds out your number who shouldn't have it, like a dove, you can throw it away and get a whole new one for dirt cheap. Maybe with this you can give your onee-chan a call, huh? I know you've been missing her."

"Yeah..." Hinami takes the box in her hands delicately, like she's afraid she'll break it. She's never had a cell phone. The one pictured on the box is small, with a tiny screen at the top and a number pad at the bottom, the two pieces connected by a hinge so the phone can be closed like a clam's shell. It doesn't look anything at all like the fancy phones Kaneki and Touka had used before.

She can talk to Touka again.

And what will Touka say to her? _Did you like the book? It probably sucks but I'm new at picking books out. You probably would have picked out better, but it's still not safe. I'm sorry, Hinami-chan, you still can't go outside. I'm sorry, Hinami-chan, I still haven't heard from any of the others. I hope you're safe, Hinami-chan. We'll keep you safe. We'll protect you._

She can call, and she can call, and she can call, and then one day Touka won't pick up. Hinami will go outside and listen.

And Touka won't be anywhere, either.

 

* * *

 

Hinami is lying on her bed that night, flicking through her journal, when a card falls out.

It flutters to the floor and lands with the tiniest brush of sound, something only Hinami can hear. She leans over the edge of her bed and picks it up.

**T A K A T S U K I • S E N**

**author**

**0 X X X - X X - X X X X**

Oh...she'd forgotten about this.

It seems like a lifetime ago, when she'd been living with Kaneki and the others, and Kaneki hadn't been...happy, but...at least he'd been there. And Hinami had felt better about herself, because she was doing something to help him. She was by his side, supporting him. And that one day after he and the others went to find the doctor, they'd gone to meet Takatsuki Sen, to cheer Kaneki up because he'd shut himself away for so long in his pain.

And then later, when she was with Tsukiyama at that cafe, she'd met Takatsuki there.

_I don't think there's anything you can do to help him, chan Hina_ , Takatsuki had told her.

It was the first time someone had ever treated her like an adult.

_If you ever need someone to talk to, you can call me_ , Takatsuki said, slipping her business card into Hinami's hand.

The first time someone didn't try to coddle her or hide the world from her.

Hinami picks up her phone.

 

* * *

 

She has to wait until a day when Banjou and the others are out, the rare day Hinami has the entire apartment to herself. The kind of day she normally dreads, confined within these walls, but today she's excited.

Today she's going outside.

She pulls her hair into low twin tails, digs out a pair of wire glass-frames with normal lenses from the closet, and dresses in the most neutral clothing she owns, so that if anyone sees her, she won't look like Fueguchi Hinami. (And if Banjou and Touka find out, she can say she went out prepared. Maybe they'll be impressed by her planning--though really she knows Banjou will fret, and Touka will be mad.)

She doesn't go to the same cafe as before, but to a little bookstore Hinami has never been to, right on the border with the 19th Ward. The shopkeeper is a friendly old man with a sleepy look to him, and the shop itself is a little dingy and in disrepair.

She's not sure where to go from here. She'd only been told the address and how to get there. But inside, the store is bigger than it looks from the outside, and hallways wind off from the main room leading to different sections. Should she stay here in the front? No, that would be too suspicious. She picks a hallway and decides to follow it and see where it leads.

She passes through sections with medical texts, spiritual guidebooks, encyclopedias of plants and animals and stars. One turn takes her from a shelf of travelogues to a collection of poetry, and the hallway after that leads to a room full of books printed in other languages. Psychology, classic literature, science fiction, cooking, needlework, architecture, history, economics--there's no rhyme or reason to this place. It's like a maze, and Hinami is lost. _Did it really look this big from the outside...?_

Then she turns a corner and sees a hanging sign that says CHILDREN'S FICTION. And standing on the opposite side of the room, her back to Hinami and her nose in a book, is Takatsuki Sen.

"Takatsuki-san..." Hinami pauses to catch her breath, bracing her weight on her knees.

"' _But I don't want to go among mad people_ , Alice remarked,'" Takatsuki says.

"H-huh?" Hinami looks up at her, confused.

"' _Oh, you can't help that_ , said the Cat. _We're all mad here. I'm mad. You're mad_.

"' _How do you know I'm mad?_  said Alice.

"' _You must be_ , said the Cat, _or you wouldn't have come here_.'"

"Takatsuki-san...?" Hinami ventures when it doesn't seem like she's going to continue. _Alice who? The cat what?_

Takatsuki snaps the book closed and twists around to look at Hinami, grinning. "Have you ever read Lewis Carroll?"

"Lewis Carroll...?"

"A British author from the 1800s. He's famous for Alice in Wonderland, a story about a little girl who falls through a rabbit hole and arrives in an upside-down world of magic. It's a classic. There's an American cartoon movie about it. Something-or-other-Disney."

"I haven't seen very many movies, but it sounds familiar," Hinami ventures.

"I like the book better. The movie's not as weird, and I like weird. Anyway," Takatsuki turns around fully, so she's facing Hinami. She has the book in her hand, resting thoughtfully on her chin. "That's not what we're here for. My very dear chan Hina asked me to come meet her, at a mysterious time, at a mysterious place, to talk about something mysterious. What brings you to my doorstep, chan Hina?"

Now that she's here, she doesn't know what to say. She wanted to talk to someone who wouldn't talk down to her, who would treat her like an adult, who would acknowledge her limitations and tell her what she should do to work above them.

"Um," Hinami begins, worrying at the hem of her blouse with her hands, "well, I mean, I guess it starts with my onii-chan."

"Oh, the cute, nerdy guy you were with before."

"R-right. Him. A few weeks after you and I met last, he...went missing."

"Oh, no!" Takatsuki exclaims. "That sweet boy? Is anyone looking for him?"

"Yes, a lot of people," Hinami says. "We're all...searching for him as hard as we can."

"Have you filed a missing persons report?" Takatsuki asks.

"Well," Hinami says, "it's complicated."

"Hmmmm," Takatsuki says. "It's okay, I'm listening."

So Hinami continues, in as many details as she can share or imply. She can't talk about Anteiku, the raid, the people they've lost, the terrifying presence of the CCG on their doorstep, Touka and Yomo and Banjou, about Kaneki and what he did and why he's missing. But she talks about how her family (her friends) are scared. How they're afraid for Hinami's safety, and talking about moving her, about how hard they're working to protect her. About how afraid she is of losing them. How badly she wants to protect them.

(She doesn't see it, the way Takatsuki is watching her, the almost predatory slant to her eyes.)

"I'm too weak," Hinami says. "I'm not strong enough to protect them with my power."

"You're not weak," Takatsuki says, and Hinami looks up at her in surprise. Takatsuki is smiling at her gently. She'd been expecting her to say something like, _You are weak. There's nothing you can do_ , in her straightforward, adult way. Instead she says, "You're not weak, chan Hina. You just haven't learned how to unlock your full strength yet."

A way to unlock her full strength...? Is it even possible? Would Touka allow it? Can she do it, living her days quietly, alone, while Banjou protects her? If she was strong enough, would they let her protect them?

"I want to become stronger...I want to become stronger!" Hinami twists her hands into the fabric of her skirt and bows. "Takatsuki-san, if you know how I can become stronger, strong enough to stand up for not just myself but to protect the people I care about, please tell me!"

She can feel Takatsuki's eyes on her in the heavy silence. Outside, a bird sings. A car backfires. A girl cries out in elation, singing, _I did it, I did it, I did it!_  A man stumbles drunkenly home from a bar, muttering insults towards his boss. A mother lifts her baby from its cradle and lifts it to press her face against his cheek, telling it, _I love you. Mama loves you_.

_Hinami, live!_

"Say, Hinami-chan," Takatsuki asks, "have you ever been to a tea party?"


	2. Chapter 2

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Hinami learns to live with Aogiri.
> 
> (Alice swims in a moat of her own tears.)

The hardest part isn't leaving.

_She leaves during the night like a coward, like a runaway child (which, really, she is), leaving a note on the table, written in careful hiragana so Banjou can read it, with a meager explanation and an even weaker apology._

I can't keep being protected _, she writes,_ so I'm going to become somebody who can protect instead _._ Thank you so much for everything you have done for me. One day, I'll be able to repay it in full.

_And then she slips out the door, pulling the hood of her coat tight over her head and clutching tight to the satchel slung across her chest, and scurries down the stairs and away into the dark night._

The hardest part isn't leaving.

The hardest part is knowing how disappointed Touka will be.

 

* * *

 

It's scary at first, being surrounded by strangers, and not knowing how to talk to any of them.

They watch her, with eyes cold, or curious, or hungry. She can feel herself being appraised: as predator, as prey; how much value does she have, and how quickly will she die. She can feel their eyes following her and she can tell from the sounds of their breathing, their heartbeat, the growl in their belly, the crack of a joint or the tap of a foot, what they want from her.

But they keep their distance.

Only the executives know who she really is. To the rest, she's just Eto's own hand-picked recruit. And that's enough to earn her their respect, for now.

(She's had to practice calling Eto by her real name in her own mind at first, until saying it became natural.)

Eto is kind, but cryptic; Hinami can feel a coldness blistering under her skin now that she'd never felt when they'd met before, when she believed the mask of Takatsuki Sen and swallowed the lie. The other executives are cold, dismissive, or indifferent. Tatara looks at her like she's a bug, Naki like she's a baby, Miza ambivalent, like she's expecting Hinami to die and won't waste a feeling on her.

Ayato's the only one who's different. He's gruff and harsh, and a little cruel, but there's something in his cruelty that's familiar, because it reminds him so much of Touka. A kind sort of cruelty. A cruelty that's an act to bandage up a big heart.

_It had been a shock meeting him, that first day, because she'd looked at him and he'd looked so much like her, just a little shorter, a little scrawnier, his hair a little more unkempt, and he'd looked back at her with disgust and said, "I hate people who look at me and see my sister."_

He said that, but she can't help it. She looks at him, and she keeps seeing her.

She doesn't think he realizes how alike they are.

 

* * *

 

What she'd been most afraid of was hunting.

She'd thought,  _I want to become stronger. I'm going to become stronger_ , and a part of her knew what that meant in the end: she would have to be prepared to take someone's life, the way Touka killed the investigator that killed her mother, to protect her.

She thinks she can learn to brace herself to hurt someone, to defend herself or to protect someone else, but killing someone who hasn't harmed her, who's done nothing wrong against her...?

She tries to picture herself as something cold and deadly, like Irimi before she'd met Yoshimura. She knows she could find prey quick enough--she could hear who was alone, smell who was sleepy, or distracted, or sick--and she could follow them through the maze of streets until she's alone with them in a secluded alley where no one but the person she's hunting can see what she does.

But when she tries to picture that moment where she's standing over a cowering victim, listening to them begging for their life, and she realizes--

She still thinks  _person_. She thinks,  _victim_.

And when they expose her for the fraud she is, she'll have nowhere else to go.

 

* * *

 

When there's an operation, the bodies are collected by Aogiri and brought back to base to be processed into rations for distribution. Between operations, or when an operation doesn't result in procurement of food, squads are sent out to hunt. Newer and low-ranking members are assigned to these hunting parties on a weekly schedule.

The first week, Hinami escapes this posting. She curls up in her room, shaking with relief, and tries to plan her reaction for when the assignment finally falls to her.

The second week passes without her name on the roster, and she retreats to her room with relief.

The days of the third week pass as if sifted through molasses. She focuses with intensity on each of her tasks: cleaning the common room, scrubbing out the toilets, keeping watch high up on the roof, bringing food to the one pitiful human prisoner locked in a storeroom in the basement. Hinami places the food down with a shaking hand, takes away the slop bucket, and in the end returns to her cell to bury her face in her pillow and force herself not to cry.

_I have to get stronger, I have to get stronger, I have to get stronger_ , she chants, over and over again in her mind, until she falls asleep, dry-eyed and exhausted.

The next morning she wakes up to check the task rotations and finds herself on the list.

The hunting party team.

She wishes she could say she blanked out, but everything that happened after that is etched forever in her memory.

 

* * *

 

Their team leader's name is Jurou. He doesn't know what ward he was born in, but he was raised in the ninth, and he first killed someone when he was eight years old.

He doesn't tell them all this. Almost as a rule, no one in Aogiri talks about their background, except Naki and the White Suits. But there are whispers around this person, that person, especially around executives, and if you listen, you can gain a very good picture of where that person came from.

Hinami is very good at listening.

"Shigu will take point, and Goro will take up the rear. The rest of you spread out in net formation. Hinami, this is your first time, so you stay behind me."

With this formation, Hinami is safely in the center of the group. At Jurou's lead, they follow the streets to a poor, less-populated area of the district where drunks and transients are known to roam. There's a homeless camp a few streets away--Hinami can smell them at this distance--but they don't go near enough. Too many witnesses. Instead they wait just outside the perimeter, for someone to stumble into their net.

And finally someone does.

Everything devolves into confused shouting, and Hinami can only follow what's happening by listening to the cacophony of voices around her and trying to parse through their order of relevance.  _He's gone that way--No, he's down left street--No, that was a dead alley, he's down route C--_

Everything is spinning, and she's trying to hold each person on the team in her mind and fix their locations there respective to what she knows of the map, but she doesn't know this area well enough, she's never been in this district before she came to Aogiri, and it's too hazy, she can feel a heart pumping with adrenaline and smell fear close by, but where--

Someone stumbles into her line of sight.

She's alone in the alley except for them.

It's a man, middle aged, of general weight and height, with limp black hair and limp black eyes. He sees her and she can smell the terror rolling off of him in waves, and then the sudden spark in hope when he realizes the figure before him is a fourteen-year-old girl.

_I have to do it_ , she thinks,  _I have to do it!_  And she feels her kagune unfurling from her back, the lashing tale at her spine and the flower-petal wings blooming out beneath her shoulder blades. The man freezes and cries out in fear.

_I have to do it!_  she thinks.  _I have to do it! I have to do it, I have to do it, I have to become stronger, I have to, I have to do it, I have to, I have to, I have--_

Her bikaku lash out and she can see them in her mind, those spine-like tales, slicing the man to ribbons, and she thinks,  _no!_  and screams, covers her ears from her own screaming, and her kagune jerk to the side and slice a chunk out of the building beside her.

Jurou drops down onto the street, landing behind the human, and he's looking at Hinami with a mix of wariness and disgust. Her bikaku are whipping about in a frenzy, striking at the buildings, and her koukaku curl around to protect her as Jurou launches forward to slice her from shoulder to waist.

"Crazy fucking bitch can't even control her own kagune," he mutters, and drops back. The smell of hot urine fills Hinami's nostrils. The homeless man has fallen down onto his backside, and he's pissing his pants in fear. Hinami's bikaku whip about, trying to find the source of her distress.

_It's me!_  she screams at it mentally.  _It's me, I'm upsetting you, stop trying to hurt them! Jurou-san isn't doing anything wrong, he's just trying to get food, it's me, it's_  me _, I'm the one who's too weak!_

She shudders and feels her bikaku retreating. Her koukaku stay furled around her body, until her panic has died out, and she realizes Jurou is no longer trying to hurt her.

The homeless man is dead.

Hinami looks at his body, still warm and leaking blood, smelling warmly of urine, and she feels emptiness and despair swallowing her up.

_I chose this_ , she thinks.  _This is what it means to be strong. Enduring this is what it means to be strong. I have to endure it._

She has to endure it.

Until the day comes when she can protect her family with her own power.

 

* * *

 

"I don't know what you see in her," Ayato complains, sitting with his arms hanging over the back of a chair in the battered conference room that serves as the Aogiri executives' main office. "She cries all the time, she can barely control her kagune, she can't fight, she can't kill, she can't even  _hunt_ \--what the hell's even the point of having her here?"

Eto is reclining sideways on a beaten-up office chair upholstered in torn, worn-out leather. Stuffing is spiraling out of the holes in the covering. She has a notebook in her lap, and she's writing, or doodling, or doing  _something_ , and it probably has nothing to do with Aogiri because half the time Eto doesn't even seem like she's mentally there.

"So you're saying she's weak?" Eto asks nonchalantly, after a long pause.

"Hell yeah," Ayato grumbles. "She's embarrassingly weak. By Aogiri standards, she deserves to die. She can't even  _hunt_ ," he adds again in disgust.

" _A-ya-to-kun_." Eto sing-songs, and she rolls her head sideways to look at him through the slits in her bandages. "Let me let you in on a little secret: strength comes in different forms, and grows in different ways. Hinami-chan is strong right  _here_ \--" She taps her finger to her head. "I want to make Hinami-chan strong everywhere it matters."

"Good luck with that," Ayato says. "She cried over the human her hunting party killed. She's been holed up in her room since. Jurou wants to kill her right now for endangering the party. She's a liability."

"Who's the bigger liability, the factor whose strengths and weaknesses are unknown, or the leader who should plan for all outcomes?"

"What the hell is that?" Ayato gripes. "You're saying Jurou's a liability because he didn't plan on having some soft-hearted human-lover in his group? Don't give me that shit."

Something lashes out like lightning and with a crack like thunder, and suddenly Ayato is on the floor, the chair in splinters, Eto's kagune pinning him to the ground, and her right is eye dark as nightmares, the pupil a blood-red star.

"I said I was telling you a secret," Eto says, and her voice is light but there's a dark malice chopping it into jagged pieces, "brat."

And  _dammit_ , Ayato thinks he's strong, he  _knows_  he's strong, but there's strength, and there's strength, and there's  _strength_ , and then there's the One-Eyed Owl, pinning him casually to the floor like a butterfly to a board. Eto laughs with delight, and he knows she's just toying with him, delighting in his humiliation.

It's Eto's reminder to him. That as strong as he is, he's still weak.

"Listen, brat," she says, "Hinami's mind is strong, but the rest of her is weak. We need to make those other parts of her stronger. Her heart is tender. You can't make the rest of her strong by throwing her to the wolves.

"Do you know how to cook a live crab? You don't, because even though your poor daddy cooked for the humans who lived around you, you never bothered to watch, never cared to  _see_. You see, water starts to boil once it reaches 212° Fahrenheit, or 100° Celsius--that's something you would have learned if you'd gone to school like your sister. If you put a live crab in boiling water, it will scream, because its tiny little brain knows its body is burning. It can feel it, you know, its cells erupting, liquidating, searing into other matter, into air, into nothing.

"So instead you put the crab in an ice bath. It's comfortable there, because so far the crab has been kept in warm water, and it's used to being cold. And then you turn the temperature up, just a little, just a fraction, so as the temperature rises, the crab gets comfortable. And then you turn the temperature up again, and repeat. Turn it up, let the grab get comfortable. Turn it up again, let the grab get comfortable more. Soon enough the crab is boiling, and it doesn't even know it, because you tricked its brain into thinking its environment is right. It goes to its death quiet as a baby that never learned to cry."

Eto leans back, smiling, her red eye gleaming, her kagune still pinning Ayato to the floor. He struggles against the weight of it and scowls up at her.

She knows what she's doing. Making him feel weak and helpless. Her smile widens, because she knows that he knows.

"You see, Ayato-kun, Hinami-chan is like a crab. You can't toss her into boiling water and be surprised when she screams. You have to heat her up to it. You have to teach her," she says, her kagune pressing down harder for emphasis, "to kill," and harder, "by increments," and _harder_ still, and his eyes want to water from the pain, but he forces the tears back, "until she's finally useful."

"You talk about her like she's a tool," Ayato mutters, and somehow that angers him.

Eto laughs. "Silly Ayato-kun," she croons, the edge of her voice cruel. "Everything's a tool."

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Hiragana is the most basic of Japan's writing systems, and represents the syllabic sounds that make of Japanese language. Every word has a hiragana writing that represents how it's pronounced. Children usually learn hiragana around grade 1, like a kindergartner would learn the alphabet. Hinami wrote her hiragana letter in hiragana because Banjou can barely read kanji (Chinese characters), much less hiragana.
> 
> The thing about crabs screaming while being boiled is probably a scientific myth, but I don't care, and neither does Eto.

**Author's Note:**

> "Danki" means warm weather.
> 
> The book Touka sends Hinami is "Every Heart a Dooryway" by Seanan McGuire, one of my personal favorites (everybody should go read it). I don't know if it's been translated into Japanese and honestly I don't really care, but something about the "Wayward Children" series feels like it resonates really well with Tokyo Ghoul for me.


End file.
